Economist · Builder · Pittsburgh, PA

AboutCollin

Pre-doctoral Research Associate, CMU Tepper · Incoming MSEC, Duke University

I am a predoctoral research assistant in finance at Carnegie Mellon University, working with IRS administrative data. This fall, I am heading to Duke University to pursue a Master of Science in Economics and Computation.

Originally from Casper, Wyoming, I grew up with a deep appreciation for the outdoors, including activities like hunting, fishing, rock climbing, mountain biking, and hiking — a love that has transcended time and miles. I am ACTFL-certified and fluent in Spanish, developed through an LDS mission in Mexico and Los Angeles, as well as through university studies. Alongside my wife, I love traveling and sharing the culture of her home country, Paraguay, in the US. Outside of work, I am an enthusiastic pickleball player, a bit of a gymrat, and a former beatboxer for BYU's premier mixed a cappella group.

Collin Zoeller
Pittsburgh, PA
[email protected]

Why This Research

The questions behind the papers

Motivation

"What actually happens to people when a government program arrives too late?"

Growing up near an economy defined by commodity cycles, I saw firsthand how timing matters — how the same intervention at the wrong moment can make things worse. The PPP paper is, in part, an attempt to put rigorous numbers on that intuition using data from 1.5B tax records.

The bigger question

"Can quantum computers and LLMs change how economists do empirical work?"

I'm genuinely convinced the answer is yes — and that the profession is only beginning to catch up. I build tools (StataHelper, Explain, StataAgent) and write papers (GAMA, ANN text classification) to advance that agenda alongside the empirical work.

The Path

Wyoming → Provo → Cambridge → Pittsburgh → Durham
2017–19

Volunteer Missionary

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints · East Los Angeles, CA

Two years working with migrant and refugee communities in East LA. Became ACTFL-certified fluent in Spanish and developed a lasting interest in the economic challenges facing immigrant communities — I still volunteer 3–5 hours per week teaching English to Spanish speakers.

Missionary service
2019–23

B.S. Economics · Mathematics Minor

Brigham Young University · Provo, UT

Graduated with a 3.71 GPA, Honors Program member. Led the computer vision team at the BYU Record Linking Lab — managing 6+ CV projects for FamilySearch and Ancestry. Also beatboxed in 1AChord, BYU's premier co-ed a cappella group.

1AChord
2022–23

Computer Vision Researcher

Harvard Business School · Cambridge, MA

Built a custom OCR and image segmentation pipeline processing 25k+ images and 1M+ data points for an HBS PhD dissertation on the Kodak collapse — my first real taste of research at the intersection of computer vision and empirical economics.

FHTW
2023–26

Pre-doctoral Research Associate

Tepper School of Business, CMU · Pittsburgh, PA

Leading empirical work on ~1.5B-observation IRS datasets through the IRS Joint Statistical Research Program. Taking graduate ML and quantum computing coursework alongside the research. Completing GAMA-IV thesis on quantum annealing for IV estimation.

PLC Presentation
2026–

Master of Science in Economics and Computation

Duke University · Durham, NC

Incoming student in the MSEC program — continuing work at the frontier of empirical methods, machine learning, and quantum computation in economics.

Duke University

Outside the Lab & In the Press

Life beyond the research
Outside the Lab The rest of the picture
In the Press External coverage

Currently

What I'm doing right now

Building

StataAgent

Agentic AI for natural language Stata interfacing

GAMA-IV

Duke MSEC thesis — quantum annealing for optimal IV selection

AI in Economic Research

Sole-authored meta-analysis paper in progress

Studying

Quantum Integer Programming

Graduate coursework at CMU

GAMA Quantum OLS

Working paper on D-Wave optimization

Working Toward

Incoming MSEC, Duke University

Master of Science in Economics and Computation · Fall 2026

More open-source tooling

Expanding the Stata × Python ecosystem